So, Santa Claus paid close attention to my (Amazon) wish list this Christmas and gave me four books that I was desperate to read/ have. Among them, were two of Brendon Brazier’s books on his Thrive food and fitness program. Brendon Brazier was a professional Ironman, which in itself is awesome, but the coolest thing about Brendon Brazier is that he became an elite athlete on a plant-based diet. He’s vegan! If you listen to the general nutritional wisdom of our current culture, that really shouldn’t be possible. There’s no way he get’s enough, protein, right? Whatever.I’m not sure if you noticed but our culture is insane about food. Insane. I don’t just mean that we like a lot of it. And mostly the least healthy kind. We are also obsessed with finding that magic combination of foods that will make us all look like supermodels. And a lot of us think that never eating anything at all is that magic combination – water and an occasional saltine cracker and an occasional celery stick – oh ya! And don’t forget a few kale chips. A lot of us swing back and forth between eating any & everything we want and starving ourselves out of guilt and desperation. We drink “kale juice” that tastes like…well… “kale juice” and we say to ourselves, “well if that’s what eating healthy is, it’s for the birds!” and we go back to deep fried chicken wings dipped in bleu cheese dressing. We are not right.

And we are exactly the same with exercise. Statistics definitely demonstrate that most of us just don’t do anything. But among those of us that do – the exact same insanity persists. There must be some magical exercise that will make everything right. The general idea seems to be “if I’m going to exercise, I must have to exercise until I feel like I’m about to die in order to get anything out of it. Even though I don’t have any of the core strength, muscle tissue or stamina of Jillian Michaels, I’m just going to go ahead and mimic her exact workout.” Insane! We overdo it. And we make ourselves miserable and then we say to ourselves, “well if that’s what ‘working out’ is, it’s for the birds!” and we go back to sitting on the couch and shoveling our face with cheese fries. We’re nuts, people.

From Brazier's book THRIVE Fitness

I have been taking lifelong wellness “activity” classes at Delta College, where I teach English, basically since I started working there in 2005. Every class begins with the same information. The FITT Principle for The Five Components of Health-Related Fitness (Cardiorespiratory Endurance, Muscular Strength, Muscular Endurance, Flexibility & Body Composition). One of my instructors always makes the clear point that this FITT Principle is a prescription. It is what we need to do to be physically healthy on a daily basis and to significantly reduce our risk of contracting most major diseases. She talks about the fact that if a doctor gave us a prescription (usually in pill form), most of us would take it without question. And the FITT Principle is no different. It is what we should be doing without question. But… I have always been intrigued by one major point all of my instructors make regarding the FITT Principle. What sort of activities should we choose to do? Which activities are best? Guess what even the experts say: Whatever activity we enjoy! And this is the part where some of my classmates seem to plug their ears and the message that most Americans seem to be missing: Have fun! Enjoy yourself! When it comes to healthy eating and exercise, you’d think that America has some kind of law against having fun and enjoying yourself – because most people approach both as if they are some dreaded chore. I think the first thing we need to do is realize that eating and exercise are personal. My sister has told me several times that early on in her work as a dietician she realized that people’s food choices (diets) were as personal to them as their political opinions, religious beliefs, and spending habits. Whether we are aware of it or not, food is personal. And exercise is no different. Our minds, emotions, physical body are all ONE system. How we feel about our bodies (which comes from a complex web of a lot of different sources) plays out in whatever activities we choose to do. Whenever we move our bodies, we are confronted with such a vast number of emotionally charged signals and values about them, that just exercising becomes a very personal space. What makes matters harder is that we, as a culture, seem hell-bent on acting like we are unaffected by anything. We are all “too cool for school,” as my friend Jeremy would say. Taylor Mali actually wrote a poem about how this uber-coolness affects our language choices and the way we converse with one another. Indeed, I have become most aware of this phenomenon while realizing how much most of my students resist being moved by texts – poems, stories, articles, essays, films. They resist being moved because they don’t want to have to face what this new information means in their lives. They don’t want everyone around them to think they are “uncool” and they don’t want to change. In most classes, there is a small handful of criers or seekers or especially sensitive students that I’ve caught at just the right time but many of my students are not moved, refuse to be moved because, ultimately, it’s just not cool. So food and exercise is personal but we don’t want to admit that they are personal. We want to believe we can just let go of old eating behavior, swear off our mother’s lasagna forever, force ourselves to eat tofu even if the thought turns our stomachs. We want to believe we can just get up off the couch and start powerlifting, running marathons, win body competitions – even if just walking up a flight of stairs gets us winded. But food and exercise are so connected to our emotional and spiritual lives that it simply doesn’t work like that. If you swear off your mother’s lasagna, force yourself to eat tofu, drink only raw juice for a week, head into the gym and hit the weights and treadmill as hard as somebody who’s been doing it for 15 years – chances are, you’ll make yourself miserable. And the only result is going to be you feeling like a failure, telling yourself, “I can’t eat healthy” and “I don’t like to workout” and feeling disdainful of all those people who can and do. This brings me back to Brendan Brazier who gives the most radical fitness advice I’ve ever read: If you don’t like to exercise, don’t (right away). What? I had to read this entire paragraph five times over to make sure I understood what he was saying correctly. And, indeed, he means what he says. If you don’t like to exercise, don’t (right away). Wow. See, overall, Brazier’s book is really not that much different from any other book about exercise. They all boil down to roughly the same points (move your ass, within reasonable limits) BUT his initial approach is wildly different from most books on the subject. That’s because he seems to begin with the basic premise that health is personal. Brazier begins with a discussion of how stress is related to physical fitness, exercise and willpower. He explains how willpower is related to enjoyment. We gain the willpower to do things we dislike doing by doing the things we enjoy doing. For some of us, working out IS the thing we do so that we have the willpower to do all of those things we dislike doing (like grading essays). But for many of us, especially those of us just trying to start a new fitness regimen from ground zero, exercise requires willpower. Brazier’s point is that if exercise requires a great deal of your willpower – you’ll need to build up some willpower first before you even try to do it. He doesn’t say it directly but this is, in part, a description of how and why exercise is personal. What we eat and the way we move our bodies are both physical manifestations of our mental and emotional selves. Friends tell me all of the time that I’m a “healthy eater” and they don’t mean this in the way that my dad or my friend’s parents’ used to mean it when I was a kid – back then, I was a “healthy eater” because I ate A LOT and like a “good girl,” cleaned my plate. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what my friends mean. I think they mean I eat a shit-ton of vegetables and I’m conscious about how much meat, saturated fat, and nutrients I’m taking in. I think they mean I’m often counting calories and making sure I don’t overeat. I think they mean I cook almost all of my own meals at home. For me, that’s healthy. So, that’s cool that they notice that I guess.

But what I’ve come to be bothered by is how many of my friends will then quickly say, “I couldn’t eat that healthy” or “I’m not a healthy eater.” And again, I’m confused by what they mean but I think they mean “I couldn’t eat that many vegetables,” or “I couldn’t cook most of my own meals,” or “I don’t like tofu,” or “I couldn’t count all of my calories” or “I love to eat meat and fried stuff. I could never give them up.” I don’t know. I honestly don’t know why anyone would say “I can’t eat healthy” but I believe it has something to do with the fact that they don’t realize that MY healthy is not THEIR healthy. What I eat is not what is necessarily “healthy” for everyone. It’s what I enjoy and/or what I’ve learned is best for MY body. I enjoy cooking – a lot! I love vegetables – a wide variety of them. I’m not a picky eater at all – so things that initially taste weird, like tofu, don’t turn me off. I don’t like the way eating meat makes me feel. And no one enjoys the way eating dairy makes me feel. I avoid fried foods as much as I can because they are a massive trigger for my compulsive overeating. And I track all the foods I eat (on good days) for the same reason – because managing my eating disorder means making sure I’m not eating too much.

There are probably millions of books and websites with an explanation of “how to eat healthy” but they all boil down to three basic rules: 1) eat real food; 2) do not eat too much of it; 3) eat mostly plants. These are the three basics found in Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules” (which I HIGHLY recommend for anyone who thinks that healthy eating is confusing). I would tweak Pollan’s rules in this way (though he mostly covers these points too in his book): 1) eat real food that you enjoy; 2) be aware of how much food you need and don’t eat more or less than that; 3) eat mostly plants (this one is hard to improve upon); 4) realize food is personal and be gentle with yourself when you make what you perceive to be, "a mistake."

These rules are simple but if you eat nothing but processed food or fast food all day long, they are not easy to adhere to. The one thing EVERY healthy diet has in common is to cut as much processed and fast food out of your diet as possible. So, if that’s all you eat – these rules are a personal attack, these rules will piss you off – which is why I’ve added number 4. Part of “eating healthy” and “being healthy” has to be accepting yourself for where you are right now and accepting the fact that there are only so many changes you can reasonably make at one time.

And here’s this: There is no magic diet. There is no magic workout. Paleo. Vegan. Gluten-Free. Low-Fat. Atkins. Mediterraean. Cross-fit. Zumba. Soul Cycle. Whatever. What do YOU like? What does YOUR body want? Start there.

Someone tells you that P90X is the best way to get into shape and you try it and hate it (I mean, really, who can listen to that guy's voice for an entire hour!?), TRY SOMETHING ELSE. P90X is awesome for your friend but not for you. This doesn’t make you a terrible, unhealthy person. It makes you different from your friend. Guess what? You are a unique individual – there’s no one like you on this planet. Wake up to yourself!

Someone tells you that you have to try a Gluten-Free diet because they’ve tried it and it made ALL of their problems disappear? You try it and after 24 hours and half-a-loaf of millet bread later, you want to start hurting small animals? Guess what? It’s NOT FOR YOU!

I became curious about Brendan Brazier’s Vegan lifestyle and athleticism NOT because I want to be vegan –though I’ll fully admit, I’ve always admired Vegan philosophy—but because I’m trying to figure out how not to eat dairy (because I’m at least mildly lactose intolerant) and because I just read The China Study which is about the link between cancer and animal protein. And, because I like to cook, I like to find new ways of getting the protein my family and I need without it all coming from meat. Whatever changes I make in MY diet based on Brazier’s book will be changes that will be right FOR ME, not necessarily for anyone else. In my own triathlon training, too, I’m struggling with the relationship between eating and working out – finding the right balance of fueling for workouts but knowing when enough is enough (which, again, is difficult because of my propensity toward compulsive overeating) – particularly with regards to protein. While reading Brazier, I may have accidentally discovered that somewhere along the way I also started forgetting to have fun with this triathlon thing. So, now I’m also on a mission to regain my attitude of fun towards my workouts instead of just forcing myself through them.

I have wanted to be a group fitness instructor for a very long time – I think the first time I thought about becoming a fitness instructor, I was twenty or twenty-one (20 years ago!). But, here’s the thing, I’m curvy and my weight fluctuates so while I’ve always wanted to teach fitness, I’ve been worried that I don’t “look” like a fitness instructor. Ironically, I remember first wanting to be a group fitness instructor for this very reason. I wanted other curvy girls to know that they didn’t have to be a stick figure in midriff-exposing spandex (which is what EVERY fitness instructor in the late 80s- mid 90s looked like, at least to me) to be “fit.” Over the past few years, I have worked toward my ACE group fitness instructor certification, I’ve also completed nine sprint-distance triathlons and a handful of other races and I’ve discovered the awesome health benefits of strength training. My journey toward health and wellness has been a very long one -- it probably began sometime around the time that I joined the track team in sixth grade. Each time my weight has dipped down into a place where people might consider me “thin” they always assume I have just recently found some magic diet or magic workout that is making it happen. They want to know my secret. Inevitably, when some of the weight comes back, they assume that I’ve failed at whatever trick I was trying and that I am no longer “healthy.” But I have been “healthy” (and gradually healthier and healthier) by a lot of standards for a long time and it has taken me all this time to realize that my weight, alone, doesn’t make me “healthy” or “unhealthy.” When I look back at the long continuum of the journey that I’ve been on, the times when I felt the best and probably looked the best (and there have been a couple of occasions where I was too thin – so I’m not just talking about thinness) was when I was happy. I was enjoying myself. I was having fun.

When I am having the most fun, I'm active all day long. I'm active with my kids. I workout. I walk briskly at work. I break up my desk-work with little bouts of exercise. I'm walking the dog regularly. I eat sanely. I have energy and I'm almost constantly active. I've recently learned about a phenomenon among athletes that causes a fair amount of unhealthiness, even in people we'd imagine are "fit," wherein they become sedentary in every other aspect of their lives outside of their sports. I've probably only recently learned about this phenomenon because I've only recently started thinking of myself as an athlete and started reading articles and books geared towards athletes. This is definitely what was happening with my tri-training. I would push myself so hard in my "workouts" that I was too tired to play with the kids or walk at work or be mindful of my food intake or break up my desk-work with little bouts of exercise or even to walk the dog! So, this is MY new challenge. How do I hold onto the training but keep all of the activity and thus, the fun and happiness? Oh, I'll figure it out. The roller skates are definitely helpful.

I feel like this post should end with advice. Because most writings about food, exercise, health, etc… end with advice. As an English instructor who has to teach people how to find reliable sources, I would urge you to find reliable sources when it comes to questions about your health and happiness. As a newly certified Fitness Instructor, I believe Brendan Brazier is one such reliable source so I’ll end with his basic advice. Reduce unnecessary stress in your life and find whatever it is YOU enjoy doing (& eating) and do it. Accept who YOU are (first!).

I borrowed this image from http://spokesandwaves.com/beulah/ click on it to see what's up

As a complete accident, one of the threads of this blog seems to be spirituality. Recently, I was honored to be asked to speak at my Unitarian Universalist "Church" at our Credo service -- where three members of the congregation are asked to talk about their unique belief system and/or what brought them/ brings them to Unitarian Universalism. What follows is what I wrote for my credo talk. I had no intention of blogging this but several members of the UU caught me after the service and asked for a copy of it so here it is...

The first time I remember feeling moved by something greater than myself, I was collecting minnows in a bucket at Crystal Lake. The sun was warm and high and I was acutely aware of it warming my skin. I watched as those soft-hard edges of sunlight cut through the top of the water and slanted sideways, reaching all the way down into the sand where my feet were planted. I was four years old. Of course, I had no language at that age to tell anyone what I had discovered but the spiritual connection between the water, the sun, the sand, my own skin, my own simple action of dipping a bucket into the water to catch minnows that were always way too fast and the way that made me laugh every time – none of this needed language. It just existed in my body and all around me. I know many of you will be skeptical that a very young child would have truly felt these things. Many of you will assume that this is a feeling I’ve imposed upon this moment as an adult looking back at the child I once was. But that isn’t completely true. The language is the language of an adult, it is the story I am able to tell myself now about that moment, but the visceral feeling of connectedness was there. Many other things began happening to me at that same age that were not nearly as beautiful. Really bad things. Things that have taken me a great deal of my life to understand, accept and begin to conquer. If I were asked to do this same little talk ten years ago, I might have spent the largest portion of my time discussing these things but I’m done giving them that kind of power. They are only relevant now as explanation for why a four-year-old’s sensitivity and awareness might be heightened enough to have felt such a thing as “a spiritual awakening.” What is most important about that age for me now is that moment with the minnows when I felt – in my gut – what I would later call god, what , for a time, I wouldn’t call at all and what I now usually refer to as the Universe. I was hooked by the Universe then and I began seeking as many experiences as I could to have that feeling again. I searched for that spiritual connection to the Universe in many of the typically bad places that damaged children and teenagers will. But I also felt this connection most times when I was alone with my mother – especially in our Episcopalian church. It wasn’t the church, as it turned out. It was just the quiet closeness with my mother that created that connection. And I also discovered music and drawing and writing and poetry and hiking. And I have felt that connection to the Universe watching sunrises, sitting on trains and in bus stations, reading, giving birth. I can find it now when I’m cuddling with my children, running, biking and swimming, when I’m walking my dog, when I’m dancing, cooking, even teaching. In fact, I have found that if I am seeking and willing, I can find this connected spiritual awakeness to The Universe almost anywhere at any time. The key is: I have to be willing. I have to be seeking. I have to radically accept the Universe for what it is in that moment. As I understand it, “radical acceptance” is that kind of love that loves even what we want most to hate and shun. This is the ultimate compassion. And, it isn’t easy. Luckily, I am, by nature AND through circumstance, a seeker. I think that’s why I’ve always loved stories. I have always read stories as a means of seeking, a means of finding answers and plugging into that experience of connecting to the Universe. For me, the story of Jesus, and all of the other biblical stories I was raised with, were just that, stories. But I’m not dismissing them because they are stories. In fact, to me stories are more important, more meaningful than reality. Stories are our interpretation of reality. As Stephen Sondheim, in the musical Into the Woods, tells us: Stories are the Spell we cast on the world. They are the meaning we give to the experiences we have. And this is, in part, why I have never understood religions that separate themselves from all others. We all have stories. For each person on the planet there is a different story of the Universe. For each person there is a different kind of connectedness. Each person has to radically accept a completely different reality from anyone else’s. When I was nineteen and newly married to my first husband (you see how well that worked out), I told my father-in-law, who was an “Advent Christian” minister, that I had signed up for a yoga class. He was extremely bothered. He told me to “be careful” because yoga practitioners worship Satan. We then had to have a long conversation about what it means to worship Satan and to be anti-Christian. This conversation evolved into a conversation about whether babies that were born into Buddhist families, for example, were going to hell if they died before they had accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. He told me that they probably were but he liked to believe that God had mercy on their souls. I didn’t think that made sense – that God would have to “forgive” a child for being born into a family of good, devout Buddhists. This opinion seemed ethnocentric and xenophobic -- to put it as mildly as I can, it just sounded stupid. (by the way, I’ve been practicing yoga for about 21 years now) Here are some other stories I have been told -- that I have actually heard out loud, come from real people's mouths -- about god that have sounded really stupid to me over the years: God hated the people of New Orleans so much that he sent a Hurricane to the Gulf of Mexico and forced the Katrina Massacre to happen. God hates Muslims so much that he wanted us to declare war on Iraq and Afghanistan. God hates homosexuality so much that he sent AIDS as a plague to destroy homosexuals [and I use this word intentionally because this is the word that people who employ this line of rhetoric use]. God wants young people who question their sexuality or are bullied about their sexuality to kill themselves. God wants others to bully and kill people for being “different.” God hates women and girls who have abortions. God hates people who drink or smoke. God sends anyone who won’t admit they are a horrible sinner and in need of repentance to hell. God hates feminists. God loves white, straight, Christian (non-Catholic) folk over all others. God hates women who have been raped or sexually abused because they have clearly brought this on themselves in some way. God hates women who are not subservient to their husbands. God is attempting to eradicate some evil from Africa with the Ebola virus. God hates people who have sex before they get married. God hates people who enjoy sex. God hates divorce and people who get divorced. God loves the United States above all other nations. And, my personal favorite, God hates people who swear. But it has always been impossible for me to believe any of these stories – even for a second. I don’t know why that is, but it is. Maybe it began with the bucket and the minnows on Crystal Lake. Maybe it was my mother’s gentle system of beliefs that told me above ALL else, “God is Love.” Maybe it was the way she consciously exposed me to experiences like volunteering in soup kitchens and encouraging me to understand many of my friends’ Jewish faith by attending temple with them. I don’t know why, exactly, I’ve always believed that religions are just part of the stories that we tell or why I’ve never been able to accept that God, that The Universe hates anyone or anything really – I just haven’t. And this is the story I’m currently telling myself: Look, Bad things happen to everyone. Life is hard for everyone – even for those of us for whom life doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. Bad things happen to us. We dislike, even hate, things about our lives. We grieve. We hate ourselves. We want to change. We want better. We want to be better. The Universe is bigger than all of this, it is beyond all of this. It doesn’t have time for any of this. The Universe moves. The Universe is breathing. The Universe brings life into being, grows life in whatever way it sees fit and transitions life into death and all the while, the Universe sees and knows and does everything for us. We are inconsequential. We are little children standing at the edge of a lake, trying time and time again to catch minnows in our bucket and always failing because the minnows are too fast. Our births, our lives, our deaths – they are all part of something so big, we can’t ever know it completely. The Universe doesn’t hate ANY of us or ANYTHING about us – but it doesn’t exactly love us either, in the way that we normally understand love. The Universe must do what the Universe must do. We will never understand it. Never. There is no place to put a holocaust, a rape, a child’s untimely death, war, homelessness, hunger, illness, or any number of “bad things” that will ever make any sense if we see the Universe as either a malevolent or benevolent force. The Universe is a force. That is all. What happens within it, happens because of the very nature of it. We are at its mercy – yet we know, in the end, it will show no mercy. But “Mercy” “Bad” “Good” “Malevolent” “Benevolent” these words are the stories we tell ourselves. The Universe doesn’t have words. The Universe is all action. The Universe doesn’t tell stories. We place the words onto the Universe. WE tell the stories. The only thing we can do, for ourselves and for one another, is tell stories of love and radical acceptance. ALL so-called “evil” in this world is the result of telling stories about anything else. We tell stories about God hating this or that and only evil ensues. We tell stories about our own inadequacies and only depression and anger ensue. We tell stories about tragedy without the radical acceptance that tragedy is absolutely part of life and only hopelessness ensues. This doesn’t mean we can’t feel rage, hurt, sadness, disbelief, jealousy, disappointment, indignation or any of those feelings that come from or lead to negative behaviors --- it only means that we must radically accept those feelings for what they are and then decide for ourselves how they fit into our stories. Without radical acceptance FIRST, a story of rage will only lead to more rage; a story of jealousy will only lead to more jealousy, a story of sadness will only lead to more sadness. In the recent retelling of the Story of Sleeping Beauty, the fairy Maleficent is deeply wronged by the soon-to-be-king and Aurora’s (Sleeping Beauty’s) father. [spoiler alert] The moment when Maleficent wakes in the morning after the aspiring king, who has tricked Maleficent into loving him, has cut off her wings is the most effective metaphor for rape that I have ever heard or seen. (I don’t necessarily believe Disney wanted us to see it this way – but for me, it is impossible not to). In her intensely deep hurt that eventually turns to rage, Maleficent curses her attacker’s baby. Maleficent could not radically accept her hurt, her pain, her rage so the story she told, the web that she weaved was one filled with hurt and pain and anger. As she grows older and watches the child grow, Maleficent learns perspective and feels joy and love again. She grows into radical acceptance. The loss of her wings is still painful to her. But she sees, she accepts the movement of a Universe fraught with what we call both joy and pain. The second saddest moment in the film is when Maleficent tries to lift the curse off of the teenaged Aurora, and can’t. The damage she did in her pain, the story she told, was stronger than any of her magic – it took on a life of its own. And this is exactly what we do. We hurt. We tells stories – not necessarily just to others – often the stories we tell are only to ourselves – that become stronger than our ability to deny them. We cast spells when we tell those stories. When I was a young teenager, looking back at the hurt that had been caused to me throughout my childhood, I cast a spell of deep rage and self-hatred that I am still seeing the repercussions of, that I am still working to revoke. From the summer of 2009 to the summer of 2013, I lost my mother to a heart attack, my sister-in-law to some mysterious illness doctors were never able to name, my father to another heart attack, my brother Robert to a pulmonary embolism after a routine surgery and my brother Mitchell to ALS. When Mitchell was diagnosed with ALS, ten years before his death, we all assumed he would be the first person in our immediate family to die. We could not know that we would lose both of our parents, Mitchell’s wife and our brother Robert before that disease had finally finished doing its work. Along with a handful of other family members, I was with Mitchell for the last three weeks of his life. In those three weeks, I saw first-hand and up-close both the unnamable beauty and the incomprehensible horror of the Universe. I saw clearly that the Universe was just moving. Whether we called a day or a moment good or bad was just the story we were telling ourselves to make sense of it at the time. The spell we were casting. How I have moved through my grief and how I will continue to move through my grief is another story that I’m still working on. But this is part of it. I come to this place, This Unitarian Universalist Church because it respects my right to tell my own story, to find this connection with what I call The Universe and because it encourages me to tell stories of love and continually and radically accept who I am, who you are, who we are and what the Universe is and does, regardless of the stories we tell.

While many of the words I sent to myself that summer were copied from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, I don't think that's where this comes from.

In the summer of 2001, I worked as a secretary for a sleep-away summer camp in upstate New York and I was officially divorced from the high school sweetheart I married at 19. I was 28 years old. An old lady, as far as most inhabitants at a children's summer camp are concerned. And since I didn't have any duties with the children directly, I was given my own small cabin. For a 28-year-old who was still afraid of the dark and learning to sleep by herself for the first time in her entire life, living alone in a small cabin out in the woods felt terrifying.

When I think of that cabin now, I laugh at how much I would pay for the opportunity to get that much solitude in such a small, simple, beautiful place. All I really had to do to keep that cabin clean was sweep the floor every other day. It smelled like pine. My favorite days were the rainy ones because all the children stayed indoors and I could just lay on my bed and nap and read and listen to the rain. And even though I hated being alone, I felt held tight by the rain and the trees and my cabin made of pine -- and that was really nice. I walked on back country roads and wooded trails everyday. I read and I wrote endlessly. I made a couple of really great friends (even if I have lost touch with them since then) -- Lindsey from Manchester, England and Connie "the Kiwi" from New Zealand. We'd spend our off nights at the one local pizza parlor. We became so close with the owner of that pizza joint that we hung out at her house in her pool, with her kids a couple of times. At the end of the summer, her kids even made me a mixed CD of all of the jukebox songs they heard me freak out over and saw me dance to those nights.

Until recently, I kept a picture of the tiny little pond (New Yorkers actually call it a Lake -- but when you're from Michigan, it is simply blasphemous to call a tiny muddy polluted pool of water such as this a "Lake" - just sayin') I actually swam to the middle of in the middle of the night one evening. I kept a picture of it because this pond -- and my swim to the middle of it -- became a metaphor of that summer, that time of my life where I felt like I might be drowning but instead, forced myself to swim. During that night swim, I kept waiting for something to swallow me. But it didn't. I made it to the raft in the middle. And then I made it back to the shore.

During that summer, I did one of the smartest things I've ever intentionally done. I sent myself hundreds of letters of support. I mailed a dozen or so each week to the address where I would be staying when I returned to Las Cruces, New Mexico to finish my Master's Degree. I knew I would need them. Las Cruces is where the marriage failed, where everything -- including me -- fell completely apart. I was scared to go back so I sent myself these letters, notes, cards thinking that I'd open one every day, every time I needed a little kick in the pants, a little wave of inspiration to keep swimming.

Mostly, I copied words from the books I was reading -- words that struck me as signs from the Universe -- the stones that created a path over the river. I bought a child's writing tablet and copied these words in the best printing I could muster. It made sense to me. I was at the beginning again. I felt like I needed to start over from the beginning.

This one is almost certainly from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones.

As it turned out, I did need the letters. But I didn't need them all that semester. I only needed a few of them that semester. And then I needed a few of them when I was desperately lonely, trying like hell to make a life for myself in Boston the following year. And then I needed a few of them when I had my son in Reno, Nevada the year after that. And then I needed a few of them when I had to turn down my first full-time teaching offer because my baby-daddy couldn't see himself (or us) living in Tennessee (and, to be fair, he was absolutely right) and instead, we stayed in Dover, New Hampshire where I was jobless for the first six months. And then I needed a few of them when we moved back to Michigan. And then I needed a few of them when I stopped talking to my parents. And then I opened the last one several months after my mother's death. I needed that one more than any of the others.

As I opened the letters through the years, I would post them somewhere I could see them each day so that some of them have become mantras for me. Today, while I was cleaning out some old files in a state of out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new-year, I found these three - yellowed and half crumpled, with multiple layers of tape in the corners. Well-loved but stashed somewhere, probably several years ago and forgotten -- until today.

One of the frustrating things, for me, about turning 40 (the birthday before last) was that I felt like I probably should have known more or have learned more by then. Since that magical 40th birthday, I've spent a lot of mind-space picking on myself for not having figured enough out. It often feels like I've forgotten how to take care of myself or what my basic needs even are. But, coming across these letters, these signs, today, it occurred to me that I've actually had more figured out than I give myself credit for, for a long time. Don't waste time being afraid. Trust yourself. Be who you are, unashamedly.

One night during that summer at the sleep-away camp, I was deep into a self-pitying rant when my Kiwi friend, Connie, offered up a painful and simple directive: "JodiAnn, wake up to yourself!" I learned after that night, that this is a relatively common phrase in Australia and New Zealand. It means just what it says. You say it to people who have lost touch with what's important, true, right or real -- people who are being idiots. I took Connie's directive to heart. I did begin waking up to myself. And then, there have been times in the last 13 years where it's just been easier to go back to sleep for a bit. Luckily, that old me, was smart enough to send me words that serve as my alarm for when sleep has become too easy. Luckily, that old me knew I was going to have to wake up and wake up and wake up and keep waking up to myself -- and that I might need a little help along the way. It turns out, despite what I often think, I have always been my own ally and have always known what I need to get me through even the darkest times. Huh.

Whenever I spend time revisiting who I used to be -- which isn't all that often -- it is usually to scoff at past choices, roll my eyes at how ridiculous that woman was, or lament the loss of my various innocences. But I'm thinking the time for all of that is over. I'm thinking that maybe I should spend some time with my previous self and honor the hard work she did to keep me sane and happy and swimming. I'm thinking I should be grateful for the letters she sent me that summer and for all of the signs she has collected for me since -- that continue to lead the way across the river, even in a fair amount of darkness.